What is the best choise for seasonal pages that rank after the season is over?

[A.Popoviciu]

Hello and thank you for your attention.

I am optimizing a travel website and I have a few problems. Every time I get a good rank for a particular keyword the owners take down the page because the offer is over. They also take down the category because the season is over.  That is why I loose all the rankings. What is the best option in this cases and how should I guide the whole team that putts offers and new categories on the website? Would a Static sitemap be enough - I do not know what to do as moving a category from the main menu to a sitemap - another page on the website would result in loosing authority - and SERP.

Thank you!

[seanmccauley]

Keep the page up, but 301 redirect it to the page a customer is going to find most useful. That page may be the equivalent deal for the new season, or a page listing the current new-season deals for that destination. That way, any sites who had linked to old offers will pass their link juice to the new offer.

This way, most of the link juice is preserved and the customer is less likely to bounce.

[activitysuper]

Leave the links to the seasonal categories in the footer, when it comes round to the season just reactivate it in the nav.

[A.Popoviciu]

The problem is the name of the category - in the main menu. For example we have the category: Vacation in Greece. This category is seasonal and after the summer was over the admins of the website - usually employs of the travel agency that have nothing to do with SEO, just removed it.

[A.Popoviciu]

The problem is that if I add the category in the footer - and all the categories actually  I would have too many links on my main page  - I currently have 400 and the correct number would be 100.

[Tompt]

I would tend to avoid the 301 redirection in this case because it isn't an actual permanent redirect.

Leave the page up, make sure the content isn't misleading or confusing (no old offers, clear mentions of what year you are referring to). Point any internal links to the current relevant special offer, and cycle that process as the seasons change.

Patrick McKenzie who the man responsible for http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ has a separate domain for each season. It's overkill at this scale, but the overall process is pretty much what I described above, the pages never go away, the 'internal' links to them are simply switched out to whichever is relevant.

[Tompt]

The problem isn't really an SEO problem it's a communication problem, you need to explain the problems to your client and try to make them aware of the impact it will have on their business.

With regard to your sitemap question so long as the page is still present and accessible you should be fine (provided the information on it is kept up to date). It will lose some authority by not being visible elsewhere but it should regain that quite quickly once it is re-instated.

If you have 400 links on a page it might be time to start consolidating some of the categories into broader terms, or removing the links when they fall out of season. Don't remove the page just move the links to a less prominent location.

[activitysuper]

Maybe you could show your client this http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Vacation%20in%20Greece&geo=US&cmpt=q

Which shows, although you get more traffic in summer there is still search traffic for the rest of the year for the pages they are taking down.

This is an incentive for them to keep those pages up and for you to maintain your SEO plans.

Just an idea to try win them round to keeping the pages up.